At that moment I heard footsteps on the stairway to the vault. I put the photograph back into my coat pocket and turned, facing the entrance to the gallery. The footsteps stopped and all I could hear now was the rain beating against the marble. I went towards the entrance and looked out. The figure had its back to me and was gazing at the city in the distance. It was a woman dressed in white, her head covered by a shawl. Slowly she turned and looked at me. She was smiling. Despite the years, I recognised her instantly. Irene Sabino. I took a step towards her and only then did I realise there was someone else behind me. The blow to the back of my neck fired off a spasm of white light. I felt myself falling to my knees. A second later I collapsed on the flooded marble. A dark silhouette stood over me in the rain. Irene knelt down beside me; I felt her hands surrounding my head and feeling the place where I’d been hit. I saw her fingers emerging, covered in blood. She stroked my face. The last thing I saw before I lost consciousness was Irene Sabino pulling out a razor and opening it, silvery drops of rain sliding across the blade’s edge as it drew towards me.
I opened my eyes to the blinding glare of an oil lamp. The guard’s face was watching me impassively. I tried to blink as a flash of pain shot through my skull from the back of my neck.
‘Are you alive?’ the guard asked, without specifying whether the question was directed at me or was purely rhetorical.
‘Yes’, I groaned. ‘Don’t you dare stick me in a hole.’
The guard helped me to sit up. Every time I moved I felt a stab of pain in my head.
‘What happened?’
‘You tell me. I should have locked this place up over an hour ago, but as I hadn’t seen you leave, I came to investigate and found you sleeping it off.’
‘What about the woman?’
‘What woman?’
‘There were two.’
‘Two women?’
I sighed, shaking my head.
‘Can you help me get up?’
With the guard’s assistance I managed to stand. It was then that I felt a burning sensation and noticed that my shirt was open. There were a number of superficial cuts running in lines across my chest.
‘Hey, that doesn’t look good…’
I closed my coat and felt the inside pocket. Marlasca’s photograph had disappeared.
‘Do you have a telephone in the booth?’
‘Sure, it’s in the room with the Turkish baths.’
‘Can you at least help me reach Bellesguard, so that I can call from there?’
The guard swore and held me by the armpits.
‘I did tell you to come back another day,’ he said, resigned.
35
A few minutes before midnight I finally reached the tower house. As soon as I opened the door I knew that Isabella had left. The echo of my footsteps down the corridor sounded different. I didn’t bother to turn on the light. I went further into the apartment and put my head round the door of what had been her room. Isabella had cleaned and tidied it. The sheets and blankets were neatly folded on a chair and the mattress was bare. Her smell still floated in the air. I went to the gallery and sat at the desk my assistant had used. She had sharpened the pencils and arranged them in a glass. The pile of blank sheets had been carefully stacked in a tray and the pen and nib set I had given her had been left on one side of the table. The house had never seemed so empty.
In the bathroom I removed my wet clothes and put a bandage with surgical spirit on the nape of my neck. The pain had subsided to a mute throb and a general feeling that was not unlike a monumental hangover. In the mirror, the cuts on my chest looked like lines drawn with a pen. They were clean, superficial cuts, but they stung a great deal. I cleaned them with surgical spirit and hoped they wouldn’t become infected.
I got into bed and covered myself up to the neck with two or three blankets. The only parts of my body that didn’t hurt were those that the cold and the rain had numbed to the point that I couldn’t feel them at all. I lay there slowly warming up, listening to that cold silence, a silence of absence and emptiness that smothered the house. Before leaving, Isabella had left the pile of Cristina’s letters on the bedside table. I stretched out my hand and took one at random, dated two weeks earlier.
Dear David,
The days go by and I keep on writing letters to you which I suppose you prefer not to answer – if you even open them, that is. I’ve started to think that I write them just for myself, to kill the loneliness and to believe for a moment that you’re close to me. Every day I wonder what has happened to you, and what you’re doing.
Sometimes I think you’ve left Barcelona, and won’t return, and I imagine you in some place surrounded by strangers, beginning a new life that I will never know. At other times I think you still hate me, that you destroy these letters and wish you had never known me. I don’t blame you. It’s curious how easy it is to tell a piece of paper what you don’t dare say to someone’s face.
Things are not simple for me. Pedro couldn’t be kinder and more understanding, so much so that sometimes his patience and his desire to make me happy irritate me, which only makes me feel miserable. He has shown me that my heart is empty, that I don’t deserve to be loved by anyone. He spends most of the day with me and doesn’t want to leave me alone.
I smile every day and I share his bed. When he asks me whether I love him I say I do, and when I see the truth reflected in his eyes I feel like dying. He never reproaches me. He talks about you a great deal. He misses you. He misses you so much that sometimes I think you’re the person he loves most in this world. I see him growing old, on his own, in the worst possible company – mine. I don’t expect you to forgive me, but if there’s one thing I wish for in this world, it is for you to forgive him. I’m not worth depriving him of your friendship and company.
Yesterday I finished one of your books. Pedro has them all and I’ve been reading them because it’s the only way I can feel that I’m with you. It was a sad, strange story, about two broken dolls abandoned in a travelling circus that come alive for one night, knowing they are going to die at dawn. As I read it I felt you were writing about us.
A few weeks ago I dreamed that I saw you again: we passed in the street and you didn’t remember me. You smiled and asked me what my name was. You didn’t know anything about me. You didn’t hate me. Every night when Pedro falls asleep next to me, I close my eyes and beg heaven or hell that I might dream the same dream again.
Tomorrow, or perhaps the next day, I’ll write again to tell you that I love you, even if it means nothing to you.
CRISTINA
I let the letter fall to the floor, unable to read any more. Tomorrow would be another day, I told myself. It could hardly be worse than this one. Little did I imagine the delights in store. I must have slept for a couple of hours at the most when, all of a sudden, I awoke. It was still long before dawn. Somebody was banging on the door of my apartment. I spent a couple of seconds in a daze, looking for the light switch. Again, the knocking on the door. I must have forgotten to lock the main entrance to the street. I turned on the light, got out of bed and walked along to the entrance hall. I slid open the spyhole. Three faces in the shadows of the landing. Inspector Grandes and, behind him, Marcos and Castelo. All three with their eyes trained on the spyhole. I took two deep breaths before opening.
‘Good evening, Martín. I’m sorry about the time.’
‘And what time is this supposed to be?’
‘Time to move your arse, you son-of-a-bitch,’ muttered Marcos, which drew from Castelo a smile so cutting I could have shaved with it.